How does the sum work?
Write your date of birth as three numbers: the month, the day and the year. Add them as whole numbers. Then add the digits of the total. If that comes to 22 or less, it is your first card. If it is more, add its digits again.
Greer’s own example, from her blog, is a reader born on 10 October 1986. 10 + 10 + 1986 = 2006, and 2 + 0 + 0 + 6 = 8. In this deck trump 8 is Strength. A total that comes down to one digit at once gives one card for both places. Greer calls that a Single.
What happens to your date?
Your date isn't kept, and never goes into the page address. With JavaScript on, the sums happen in your browser. Without it, the date goes to our server, is added up there, and is not stored. A link to your cards holds only their number, never your birthday.
Why two cards, and now and then three?
Most dates give two cards. The first, which Greer calls the Personality card, is the number of 22 or less. The second, her Soul card, is that number added down to one digit. So 13 gives Death, and 1 + 3 = 4 gives the Emperor. One total gives three: 19 is the Sun, 1 + 9 = 10 is the Wheel of Fortune, and 1 + 0 = 1 is the Magician.
In the 1909 deck the Fool carries a 0. Greer counts him as the 22nd trump, so a total of 22 gives the Fool and the Emperor. “Many people don’t include the Fool,” she writes of the Emperor’s group. She does.
What are the Hidden and Year cards?
Greer groups the trumps by the digit they come down to, and calls each group a constellation. The Emperor’s has three: 4, 13 and 22. A card of your group that your total didn’t reach is your Hidden or Teacher card. Her reader born in 1986 has Strength, and the Star as well, because 17 also comes down to 8. “It is ‘hidden’,” Greer replied to her, “because you didn’t get 17 directly as a sum.”
The same sum with the year of your latest birthday gives your Year card, read down to 22 or less. It changes on your birthday, not on 1 January.
Where does the method come from?
Mary K. Greer is an American author and teacher of tarot. She set out the birth cards in Tarot for Your Self(1984) and gave them a book of their own, Tarot Constellations (1987), reissued as Who Are You in the Tarot? (2011). She came back to them in Archetypal Tarot (2021). Her classes also teach a second way to add, digit by digit along the date. It ends at the same Soul card but can give a different first card. This page uses the column sum, as her own example does.
Greer counts the trumps as the 1909 deck numbers them, with Strength at 8 and Justice at 11. In older decks, such as the Tarot de Marseille, the two swap places. Here each card comes with its scan, Waite’s words and a prompt to look. What the cards have to do with you is yours to find.
What are Greer’s nine constellations?
| Digit | Trumps | Totals that give them |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | The Magician (1), Wheel of Fortune (10), The Sun (19) | 19/10/110/1 |
| 2 | The High Priestess (2), Justice (11), Judgement (20) | 20/211/22 alone |
| 3 | The Empress (3), The Hanged Man (12), The World (21) | 21/312/33 alone |
| 4 | The Emperor (4), Death (13), The Fool (22) | 22/413/44 alone |
| 5 | The Hierophant (5), Temperance (14) | 14/55 alone |
| 6 | The Lovers (6), The Devil (15) | 15/66 alone |
| 7 | The Chariot (7), The Tower (16) | 16/77 alone |
| 8 | Strength (8), The Star (17) | 17/88 alone |
| 9 | The Hermit (9), The Moon (18) | 18/99 alone |
Where is all this from?
- Mary K. Greer, “Emperor/Death/Fool Birth Cards and Daechwita”, Mary K. Greer’s Tarot Blog, 5 January 2021, and her reply to a reader of 16 March 2021 (the 1986 example, the Fool as 22, Hidden or Teacher cards).
- Mary K. Greer, “Who Are You in the Tarot?”, 17 August 2011, and her reply of 16 September 2011 (“a Single 2 (2000)”, “an 11 Year (which I consider to be Justice)”).
- Mary K. Greer, “Working with Your Tarot Birth and Year Cards”, recorded class (the column and the digit-by-digit sums; the Year card changes on each birthday).
- Mary K. Greer, Tarot for Your Self (1984); Tarot Constellations (1987); Who Are You in the Tarot? (2011); Archetypal Tarot (2021).
